NO LONGER ENCUMBERED BY ANY SENSE OF FAIR PLAY, EX-JOURNALISTS RETURN TO ACTIVE DUTY TO FIGHT THE TRUMPIAN MENACE!

A time to stand up, a time to divide

Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared on the author’s other blog, Roamin’ Gnomials.

My real name is attached to this commentary, but it wasn’t always that way. When I started my first blog, I tried to adhere to sensible precautions that my words would be seen by thousands of people, some of them quite possibly dangerous.

Little by little I relaxed my guard. I made it so my name might be discovered, but only if you really worked at it, an assignment, I hoped, that might prove too difficult for the casual lunatic.

Me with my youngest grandchild, Zoe, on a Civil War battlefield. Half Latina in Trump’s America, Zoe is just one of the many reasons why I’ve decided to stand and fight.

But with the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, I’ve stood up, not hiding behind my keyboard as some have suggested. With the creation of The Shinbone Star, I decided to drop my safeguards. That decision might strike you as unwise since one of the most dangerous lunatics of this (or any other) age now inhabits the Oval Office, and at his beck and call, a cadre of equally dangerous goose-steppers bent on quelling dissent.

Make no mistake, Trump’s election has rattled existing fault lines that run through all segments of society, and as tragic as that is, given the extraordinary weight of what is happening, the widening of those fractures seems inevitable, even necessary.

Now is the time to stand up and put your name behind those truths that may not be quite so self-evident as we once believed!

If the election of a racist president of the United States is NOT a time to stand up, then WHEN?

If the election of a president endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan is NOT a time to stand up, then WHEN?

If the election of a president with manifest conflicts of interest all over the globe is NOT a time to stand up, then WHEN?

If the election of a president who would utter the vilest words about your mother, wife, sisters and daughters is NOT a time to stand up, then WHEN?

It has been suggested in some quarters that I apologize for my decision to part ways with friends and relatives who either directly supported Trump or abandoned their civic responsibility by not voting at all, or voting for a third-party candidate with no chance of winning.

IWILLNOT!

After working for most of my adult life to defend the rights of a free press, and after sacrificing my own right of free expression for three decades so that no hint of bias would ever taint the news reports that I edited, it has been suggested that I apologize for parting ways with people who rail against the “crooked media,” while at the same time openly sharing so-called “fake news” generated by disciples of Stephen K. Bannon, that present-day Joseph Goebbels who sits at the right hand of the president.

IWILLNOT!

It is painful when current events divide friends and families, but certainly there is sad historical precedent. I’ve actually pondered the unthinkable, that I’m one of the lucky ones whose parents are dead, and I don’t have to face the possibility that they might have voted for Trump. But there are people I know who have made painful decisions along those very lines.

Perhaps it has always been so. There come times when men and women of conscience must stand and jump to the other side of the divide, with no attempt to straddle it, and be damned to the consequences. I implore you, do not stand with people who by their actions have handed the nuclear codes to a dangerous demagogue.

These people, these Trump supporters, have directly threatened my family, my friends, my country, myworld and with a vain and ill-considered hope fostered by their iniquitous leader, think to improve their own lot by placing the yoke of burden across the backs of people with shoulders of a different color than their own. Those of us with some knowledge of history know what that sounds like.

I find it disconcerting that articles on this site generally carry no byline. That’s weird in a journalist’s world and this journalist’s experience. Is there some sort of going-incognito reason for this?

Thank you so much for standing up and speaking out. I don’t live in the US but the “Trump effect” van be felt on this side of the big pond as well and the idea of our elections coming up here next week is pretty nerve wracking.

Today I read an article about “filter bubbles” and the effect of Facebook in all of this, which helped me remember that ideas that I consider to be ridiculously wrong have been presented to others in a fashion that have made them convincing. Most importantly, it reminded me that what I consider to be right and indisputable is also just based on the filters I have chosen (and been appointed)…

An important lesson… nevertheless I really fear many will vote for the wrong people for the wrong reasons this Wednesday…